


Spring Fling Blues

by homosociality



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Sky High (2005), Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Canon Disabled Character, First Kiss, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Sky High (2005) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:23:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22780144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homosociality/pseuds/homosociality
Summary: Over the course of his last semester at the  Clark Kent Academy for the Superheroic Arts, Charles Xavier falls in love.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 15
Kudos: 61
Collections: Nothing Is So Beautiful As Spring Challenge 2020





	Spring Fling Blues

**Author's Note:**

  * For [librata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/librata/gifts).



1\. thaw

Erik Lensherr enrolls at the Clark Kent Academy for the Superheroic Arts just as spring begins to emerge, blooming-new and raw, from the year-beginning snow. Charles and Erik are partners in Weird Biology, and it’s only because of Avenge the Earth! that Charles meets the love of his life. He hears them blaring out of Erik’s headphones one day before class, and before he knows what he’s doing he’s slipped a hand out. “Can I listen?”

Erik gives him a suspicious look but leans in close anyway.

All through class, Charles hums along as Erik begins to thaw.  
  
  
2\. bloom

Charles observes Erik, intrigued, as he sulks through the hallways, shoulders back as if to make himself appear bigger, textbooks swinging desultorily from his side. He watches as Erik gets detention after detention—fighting, fighting, vandalizing the stadium wall to read “JUSTICE FOR JASON STRYKER,” fighting. Erik is withdrawn and sullen, but he scribbles essays down in class like he can escape death if he writes enough and he’s the loudest and the angriest in the Mutant-Human Alliance club and there’s just something that reminds Charles of a cactus right before spring, prickly and painful but about to bloom.  
  
  
3\. bird

Erik can fly. It’s not the main use of his Power, or even the most impressive one, but Charles, who dreamed of flight before learning he’d inherited his father’s telepathy, watches him, enraptured, at lunchtime, as Erik hovers cross-legged over the koi pond, munching through his bagged lunch and listening to Avenge the Earth! on his headphones again.

Erik sometimes gets a trapped look on his face, and Charles thinks the world must be much more difficult when you know that you can fly away at any moment. Charles taps the rim of his chair; it rings. He sympathizes.  
  
  
4\. garden

It changes when he runs into Erik in the Summers’ garden during Alex’s January “The Month Is Over, Let’s Get Drunk” party. Parties can be hard for him, claustrophobic almost, and though (almost) everyone is overtly kind to him about his chair, there are some things that they just don’t think about, like how much of parties is standing in circles, and how awkward it is to be at hip-height.

Erik is sitting on the retaining wall, sipping out of a red Solo cup. Charles wheels up next to him as inside, an Avenge the Earth! song comes on.  
  
  
5\. party

“I’m not one for parties,” Erik says after they’ve been sitting in silence for a while. It’s the first time Erik has ever initiated a conversation with him outside of nudging him in class and gesturing to his Walkman.

“Why’d you come?” Charles asks curiously.

“Mom made me. Wants me to make friends.” Erik scoffs and drains his cup. “I keep telling her I’m only here for one semester, I don’t need friends.”

“But—we’re friends, aren’t we?” Charles tries.

“No,” Erik says. He looks at Charles for a very long time. And then he leans forward and kisses him.  
  
  
6\. sunlight

Kissing Erik is like inhaling sunlight. Like tasting stars on his tongue. Erik shifts closer, his hands gripping Charles’s elbows tightly, his forehead pressing into Charles’s. Charles wants to read his mind, to know what on _earth_ goes on in that head, but he has better manners than that.

“I’m getting mixed signals here,” he gasps.

“Shut up, shut up,” Erik says, “you never _shut up_ ,” and kisses him harder, and Charles—tries to protest—all right, he’s always raising his hand in Weird Biology, but that’s because the teacher will stop talking if no one tries—but melts instead.  
  
  
7\. bumblebee

When Charles was a boy, he would try to catch bumblebees in jars. He did catch a few, but what he remembers most about that pursuit was the time he clapped a hand over an open jar with a bumblebee inside to keep it in and it stung him.

Catching Erik, too, is unexpectedly difficult and painful.

After the party, Erik goes back to ignoring him but for the way they listen to music before class. Charles aches for him, pines for him, can’t stop thinking about him, thinks that this must be love, this overwhelming sense of total obsession.  
  
  
8\. birth

If what they have was born on a Saturday, it blooms on a Monday, and it does so because of Sebastian Shaw, who sticks his leg out in front of Charles’s chair as if to trip him and _doesn’t move._

Charles grits his teeth and readies himself to say _please—_ except he never gets the chance, because Erik has grasped Shaw by the collar and delivered a right hook so robust Charles can hear the _crack_ of Shaw’s nose breaking even before he screams.

It’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake. A detention-for-two-weeks mistake. Except. Except.  
  
  
9\. warmth

Charles waits outside of detention for Erik to get out—his mother won’t notice him staying longer anyway—and watches with pleasure as Erik starts when he sees him. He wonders if this is the first time someone has waited for Erik to get out of detention.

“I thought I’d walk you to your flying car,” Charles says lightly. (The school floats approximately 15,000 feet off the ground.) And Erik—nods, jerkily, and they go in silence, Charles wheeling along, Erik matching his pace.

“See you tomorrow,” Charles says when they get there, and watches breathlessly as Erik smiles.  
  
  
10\. bouquet

So he sends Erik a bouquet for Valentine’s day.

It’s not a big deal. They’re selling flowers for Habitat for Heroes in the cafeteria, and so he sends Raven his customary yellow rose (filial love) and is about to go when he thinks of Erik.

He sends him a red carnation (admiration), a sunflower (adoration), and, bitchily, a hydrangea (heartless frigidity). The flowers come with meaning cards, and Charles leaves his unsigned—Erik will know.

All Valentine’s day Erik wears the hydrangea in his shirt pocket. No one mocks—a reputation for heartless frigidity is good for something after all.  
  
  
11\. young

In Weird Biology, their heads knock as they bend over their lap report together, and Charles remembers Erik pressing their foreheads together as they kissed and flushes what Raven tells him is an unattractive blotchy red.

“Do you want to come over to my place?” he blurts. “To finish the lab report.”

Erik glances down at the report, which is almost finished.

“Then to listen to Avenge the Earth!,” Charles blusters. “I have the new album…”

“Okay,” Erik says shyly.

 _Young love,_ thinks Mrs. Munroe loudly enough that Charles has to pretend he’s blushing and looking away for another reason.  
  
  
12\. gathering

 _“This_ is where you live?” Erik asks incredulously, and Charles thinks of Erik’s secondhand textbooks and worn-out jeans and abruptly wonders if this is a bad idea.

But Erik doesn’t say anything after that, just takes the record player that Charles holds out to him, and they go out onto the lawn. Erik spreads himself out on the grass and Charles leans back in his chair, and the music cushions them as it weaves through the clouded sky until the day darkens to twilight, until Charles can no longer see the blackbirds gathering at the edge of the forest.  
  
  
13\. wildflowers

Charles is eating lunch—alone, Raven is sitting with Hank today—under the spreading branches of the oak tree when Erik floats down to him. He’s holding out a dandelion, yellow petals spread in a many-pointed star.

Charles takes it. “Thank you?”

“Since you like flowers so much,” Erik says, and takes it back only to tuck it behind Charles’s ear. He flushes. There’s so much he wants to say to Erik, and even more things that he doesn’t have words for. He thinks they might be… courting. Does Erik?

“Hey,” Erik says, “have you ever wanted to fly?”  
  
  
14\. baby

He imagines that Erik will take him in his arms, but instead Erik lifts the entire wheelchair with his Power, and Charles whoops and throws out a hand and clings to Erik’s wrist, though he knows Erik won’t drop him, though he knows being in contact with Erik will hardly help his Power keep them both aloft. Erik takes him up, up—higher even than he usually goes—until they can barely see the school, floating on its crag of rock below—until the cold is stinging Charles’s lungs, until Charles feels reborn, utterly new, remade as something entirely Erik’s.  
  
  
15\. dessert

They eat lunch together. Erik floats his wheelchair up to the roof and sits cross-legged, hovering, so he’s eye level with Charles. They talk, and they don’t—they listen to music and Charles reads Erik his terrible English poetry—and Erik sometimes gives him a smile so warm and bright it sends shivers slicing through his skin.

“My mother’s sufganiyot,” Erik explains, when he sees Charles eyeing where the sugar-dusted donut he gets with his lunch had sat. “I’ll save you some next time.”

Charles leans over and licks the remnants from Erik’s lips, and that’s good enough.  
  
  
16\. hiking

Falling in love—real love, not infatuation—isn’t like falling at all. Instead, it’s like hiking uphill, what he remembers from when he used to go with his father to national parks to find a little respite from the constant press of minds. The breathlessness, the uncertainty of whether you’re on solid footing or will skid down when you shift your weight next, and yet the beauty, the wildness, all around you.

That’s Erik’s mind all over, he learns when Erik finally drops his telepathic shields and ushers him sweetly inside: wild, beautiful, like the very best of the world.  
  
  
17\. travel

They skip that day. Erik could fly them away, but it’s unusually cold for March, so they pile into Erik’s car and he takes them down. Charles’s heart is pounding in his chest—he’s never cut class before in his _life—_ but he thinks he could get used to Erik turning every so often and pressing exuberant, bubbling-over kisses into his mouth.

“Charles, Charles,” he murmurs, like a curse, like he can’t help himself, like he hates himself a little for his weakness.

“Erik,” Charles sighs in return, and lets their names wrap around them like prayer and peace.  
  
  
18\. sky

A giant lizard is fighting the Science Squad down by the bay, and they settle in to watch the fight. Erik procures a bag of chips from somewhere, and Charles relishes in the near-plastic texture of it, the way the sky is so bright it stings his eyes.

“Have you ever done this?” Erik asks.

“Watched a fight? In Metro City?” Charles teases, but then, “No. I’ve… never met anyone like you before.”

Above them, the lizard’s head explodes, like a very gory firework. Charles doesn’t see it; he has his eyes closed when Erik leans in this time.  
  
  
19\. rain

So, they’re dating. Or something.

They hang out after school, and they go to the movies sometimes, and they use the same headphones to listen to music. They’ll take Erik’s car and park on the edge of a cliff somewhere and neck extensively, laughing when someone jars the hover release.

Erik introduces him to the Magnificent Mrs. Lensherr, his human mother who had only cried and kissed him when he’d manifested. Charles introduces him to Raven, who is a sophomore and a pain in his ass, but who smiles at Erik like she _knows_ why Charles has been grinning lately.  
  
  
20\. song

It’s not like they don’t fight, because they do. Over _everything_. Each other’s bad habits, mutant separatism, whether ketchup is an abomination or a valued food supplement, the best Avenge the Earth! song. It’s just that… Charles has never _fought_ like this with anyone before, he’s never had this _itch_ that nags at him when someone is wrong about something the way he does when _Erik_ is wrong about something. He and Raven annoy each other plenty, but Erik isn’t annoying, he’s just… wrong. All the time. Infuriatingly.

“You actually respect him,” Raven informs him boredly. “It’s offensive, but sweet.”  
  
  
21\. new

Everyone notices. Erik’s grades improve, almost in spite of himself, because Charles seizes on every opportunity to “tutor” him, and rewards right answers with kisses. Charles laughs more. Erik starts to press flowers. Charles learns to curse in German and Yiddish.

“You look happy,” his mother tells him one day, and he starts, as he usually does when she speaks to him. But she’s smiling, something tremulous and small beginning on her face, and it’s worth it to keep loving her. It’s worth it.

Slowly, Erik stops getting into fights, though he never stops fighting. Charles loves him for that.  
  
  
22\. promise

For his birthday, Erik gets him a ring.

Not like _that_. It’s deceptively simple, two twining bands with intricate latticework, but when you look closer you realize they’re DNA strands. It’s beautiful and subtle and Charles is briefly lost for words.

“Erik, where did you get this?” he finally says. “It must have cost a fortune—”

But Erik blushes, and Charles doesn’t need his telepathy to realize where, exactly, this ring came from. He briefly wishes he had a different mutation, so that he could create something as meaningful and wonderful. Instead, all he can give Erik is his heart.  
  
  
23\. friends

He knows what their friends—well, _his_ friends—see when they look at them. Two people and their charity cases, though for different reasons. Erik, who is here because he got kicked out of his last superhero school for fighting (Charles laughs when Erik tells him this, red-faced with warmth); Charles, who had never been kissed. The golden boy and the screw-up, the loner and the lonely loser.

What they don’t see is that Charles thinks he might spend the rest of his life with Erik—not as the golden boy or the lonely loser, but as Charles.  
  
  
24\. moonlight

Erik, because he is a romantic sod, turns up sometimes at midnight and throws pebbles at Charles’s window. Erik, because he is kind of a slut, undresses him in the moonlight by the creek and straddles him, rutting slowly against him. Erik, because he is coming to be the person that Charles loves most in the world, looks at him like he hung the moon and every star, one by one, fixing each in the firmament just for Erik’s sake, for this night.

This is unbearable, Charles thinks dizzily, this is more joy than is meant for man to know.  
  
  
25\. favorites

Even though Charles Xavier is one of the most powerful students in their class, no one expects much from him. They think he’ll go into Hero Support, work behind the scenes with a computer and a comm. It’s the wheelchair, he knows. Whoever heard of a paraplegic superhero? 

But Erik asks him his plans for the future and actually listens to what Charles has to say. Erik doesn’t laugh when Charles confesses that he wants to teach at Clark Kent someday. When it’s Erik’s turn, he picks Charles— _Charles_ —to be his partner at Save the Citizen.

And they win.  
  
  
26\. picnic

They spend a lot of time outdoors, soaking up the last beautiful moments of youth before everything will change. And they spend it talking, a slow baring of souls that generally turns into a baring of bodies.

“Magneto?” Charles laughs gaily on one of these occasions.

“Shut up,” Erik says, “like you never wanted to be called anything stupid during your villain phase.”

“I didn’t have a villain phase,” Charles says loftily. Erik rolls his eyes.

“Of course you didn’t, you teacher’s pet.” He plays with Charles’s hair and feeds him a grape from the picnic basket at their feet.  
  
  
27\. bonfire

He adds, more softly, “I used to be… so angry, all the time, at the way mutants are discriminated against in the superheroic community. I just wanted someone to listen.”

“By blowing up a bus station?”

“Have you read BLR Smith on the effectiveness of violence?” Erik sniffs. Charles doesn’t know why he’s surprised; Erik is very clever when it comes to things that aren’t his Superscience & Technology homework. He twists the rings of their picnic basket into writhing circlets of gold while Charles admires their beauty.

“What changed?” Charles asked.

Erik looks right at him and says, “Someone listened.”  
  
  
28\. differences

Charles likes tea; Erik is a coffee person. Charles prefers Avenge the Earth!’s newer stuff; Erik is a purist. Charles owns a modified Flygatti; Erik drives the same beat-up old hovervan his mother used. Charles is valedictorian; Erik gets threats from Ms. Grey that if he doesn’t turn in his homework he’ll be held back.

Charles’s been accepted to the Steve Rogers Superhero University. Erik’s already secured an apprenticeship with a working hero in town.

They’ll be miles apart, and yet Charles isn’t worried at all. After all, they were worlds apart, and they found each other anyway.  
  
  
29\. hobbies

The night finals are over, Alex throws _another_ party. Charles doesn’t go this time. Instead, he teaches Erik how to play Yahtzee, and when he discovers his father’s old chessboard, chess. They play against each other long into the night, lying on the floor of Charles’s bedroom, occasionally stealing kisses after a particularly good capture or a hard-won victory.

“I love you,” Charles tells him.

“Of course,” Erik says. “Obviously, I love you too.”

Charles smiles at him—it is so very _Erik_ —and gradually, they begin to talk of other things. Ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings.  
  
  
30\. triumph

Charles’s valedictorian speech is pretty standard stuff, but this part he delivers looking straight at Erik, not caring that Raven is snickering in the audience: “What I will remember most from my time at Clark Kent is the relationships I built here that I could never have created anywhere else. Know that I speak to you when I say that you will accomplish great things with your Powers, and greater things with your hearts.”

When they throw their caps in the air, his and Erik’s knock together, which he feels is overly friendly of them, but makes him smile anyway.  
  
  
31\. second chance

Later:

Charles Xavier, Weird Biology teacher, is the person you go to with problem kids’ “villain phases.” En Sabah, who’s nicknamed himself Apocalypse, is a particularly tough case, Principal Grey warns. Always fighting and just vandalized the gym with mutant separatist propaganda.

Charles pores over his file. He’ll let the kid cool off a bit and talk with him tomorrow. Everyone, he believes, deserves a chance to be better than they were yesterday. Tonight, his heroic husband is back from a goodwill trip to Atlantis, and he plans to listen to Erik gripe about seaweed all night. He can’t wait.

**Author's Note:**

> BLR Smith on the effectiveness of violence in protest movements is _fascinating_ , by the way.
> 
> Thanks so unbelievably much to [Librata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/librata/pseuds/librata) for the beta. You rock!
> 
> I'm at [tumblr](https://homoethics.tumblr.com), and I need more X-Men content! Ask / rec me anything, please. Or, hit me up on [the discord server](https://discord.gg/7HyhZ5R).


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